"Solveig C. Robinson's important and welcome collection, with knowledgeable headnotes and helpful footnotes, recovers substantial works of literary criticism by eighteen Victorian women." -- Sally Mitchell, Temple University

Shaun Bythell, Scotland's grumpiest bookseller, is back, with seven witty and affectionate portraits of bookshop regulars.

Sexual freedom and ideology explored in the works of seventeenth-century English literature.

An account of Shakespeare's last plays in relation to the idea of 'late style'.

Shakespeare's drama originally circulated in the form of the individual actor's part, containing only a single character's speeches and cues. This collaboration of theatre history with literary criticism captures Shakespeare's development as a writer, showing how scripting and acting work together to produce characters of unprecedented immediacy.

Perfect for fans of Shakespeare to curl up with in the lead up to Christmas.

A heartfelt tribute to three women who left nothing but their stories, letters, and memories reveals the significance of their lives, their hidden possibilities, and, most importantly, the redemptive power of friendship between women.

The many facets of book-mania are pondered and celebrated with both sincerity and irreverence in this lively selection of essays, poems, lectures and commentaries ranging from the 16th to the 20th century.

Reviving the life and work of a neglected master, this biography establishes Shirley Jackson as a towering figure in American literature.

The Short Oxford History of English Literature is the most comprehensive and scholarly history of English literature on the market. It offers an introductory guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day in eleven chapters covering all the major periods of English literature chronologically. Professor Sanders provides detailed analysis of the major writers and their works and examines the impact of British literature on contemporary political, social and intellectual developments. This third edition has been revised and updated for a 21st century reader, incorporating discussion of a greater number of female and contemporary authors.

This new general introduction emphasises the importance of the short story to an understanding of modern fiction. In twenty succinct chapters, the study paints a complete portrait of the short story - its history, culture, aesthetics and economics.

This title reaches back to Boccaccio and Cervantes to find the short story's roots, then focuses on the 19th century, when the short story began in what we recognize as its modern form. It then moves on to the 20th century discussing important writers identifying important trends an movements.

This important new work explores the symbolic geographies found within modern black fiction and identifies a significant set of relations between these geographies and communal affiliations, identity politics, and understandings of a diasporic past.

Includes George Puttenham's "Art of English Poesy", Samuel Daniel's "Defense of Rhyme", and passages by writers such as Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon and George Gascoigne.

The authorized biography of a literary legend, written with unique access to all of Sassoon's previously unseen papers

Since the early 1970s, Marina Warner has been one of the most challenging, subtle and profound commentators on the culture of past and present, unravelling our webs of images, ideas and beliefs, and making new and provocative connections.

The Second Sex caused uproar when it appeared in 1949. Simone de Beauvoir sets out groundbreaking ideas on what it meant to be a woman, charting the oppression of "the second sex." She argued that gender identity was shaped by upbringing in a world ruled by men, and her most startling thesis became a rallying cry for the feminist movement.